Steep S.F. hills overcome with Hallidie’s cable car

1of 2Andrew Smith Hallidie and the first cable car
Photo ran 10/18/1948, 12/28/1952
Back of photo identifies Hallidie as man with plug hat in front
Courtesy of State Library
HandoutPhoto: Courtesy of State Library

For the first quarter century of its existence, San Francisco was not an easy place to get around. The chief culprits were hills and sand.

There was so much of the latter that the city could have been called Sand Francisco. Sand dunes as high as 80 feet loomed up on Market Street. Nob Hill and Russian Hill were so steep and sandy that it was difficult to climb them on foot and impossible with horses.

Even after the dunes on Market Street were removed and the small downtown area planked and paved, the steep eastern slopes of the two downtown hills remained sand-swept barriers to expansion.

A young Scot named Andrew Hallidie changed all that and gave the city its signature form of transportation.

As Michael Phipps notes in “Hallidie’s Folly,” an article in the winter 2009 issue of the Argonaut, the impetus to build a cable car system came to Hallidie on a cold and rainy winter day in 1869, when he was walking up Jackson Street between Kearny and Grant.

As a team of horses pulling a streetcar accident up the 8.3 percent grade approached the intersection, one of the horses slipped on the wet cobblestones. The driver applied the brake so hard the chain was ripped out and the car slid downhill, dragging the horses over the pavement. The car came to a rest at the bottom of the grade, and the horses were mutilated and killed.

Built to save horses

The 33-year-old Hallidie was horrified. He wrote years later that the accident affected him so much he became determined to create a system that would carry the public up and down the city’s steep hills and would prevent “the great cruelty and hardship to the horses engaged in that work.”

Hallidie was uniquely qualified to realize his dream. He had started working in a machine shop in London when he was 13. He and his Scottish father emigrated to California in 1852. After a brief, unsuccessful stint in the gold mines, Hallidie’s father returned to England, but Andrew stayed on in the Gold Country. At age 19, he built a wire suspension bridge over a 220-foot span of the American River.

The young Scot lived a wild life in the Gold Country. Phipps writes that Hallidie was “beset by bandits, murderers, forest fires and Indian attacks. He was snowed in for a month in the High Sierra, trapped on a runaway stagecoach, buried in a 600-foot tunnel when charges exploded prematurely at the entrance, and plummeted from a collapsing scaffold onto the rocks and rapids 25 feet below.

“He also took an unexpected and hair-raising half-mile ride down the rapids when he was swept away while trying to break up a logjam in the river.” These kinetic mishaps seem appropriate for a man who was destined to invent a system of transportation whose sense of motion was tangible.

In 1856, Hallidie began manufacturing metal rope at a mine on the American Bar, using his father’s designs. Demand for the strong rope led Hallidie back to San Francisco, where he opened a small factory at Mason and Chestnut streets. Materials were scarce, and Hallidie reportedly bought up all the old horseshoes he could find to melt down.

By 1867, at age 31, he was a successful businessman and a leading San Francisco citizen.

During the Civil War years, Hallidie had begun experimenting with wire tramways to carry ore in the mines. This was the genesis of the cable cars. Hallidie’s concept was for an “endless ropeway,” a cable spliced together to form a continuous loop. He patented an “improved grip pulley” in 1870, which kept the rope from slipping. He exhibited it at the Mechanics’ Institute, where he was president. And he began considering using the technology for public transportation, to supplement the existing horse cars and go places they could not — like up the steep hills.

Inspired by mine tram

Hallidie was not the first to consider a cable car. A former Confederate general had invented a similar system, but the car tended to be lifted off the tracks, a serious design flaw. Hallidie’s plan, based on his successful aerial mine tramway system, had no such issues. He hired an engineer, secured rights of way and settled on Clay Street on Nob Hill for the first line. Although many scoffed at what they called “Hallidie’s Folly,” he received pledges of $40,000 from residents of the area, and got other major investors.

The entire length of the line was 2,800 feet, with a rise of 307 feet from Kearny to Jones atop Nob Hill. The steepest grade was 16 percent, in the block below the summit. The powerhouse was located at Leavenworth and Clay, just west of the summit. The cable itself was the same type Hallidie used in his aerial tramway systems, with six strands of 19 wires each and a tensile strength of 160,000 pounds per square inch. The cable was an endless loop, 3 inches around and 11,000 feet long.

The cars themselves were similar in design to horsecars. An open dummy, or grip car, replaced the horse. The connection between the cable and the cars was the grip, iron jaws that seized the cable. There were three types of brakes: ordinary shoe brakes, an iron drag pole that could be inserted into the slot and the grip itself.

At a little before midnight on Aug. 2, 1873, the men in the power plant fired up the boilers. The engines turned over and the cables tightened. The rope began to hum in the street, the first occasion of a sound that would become as familiar to San Franciscans as Bow Bells to a London cockney.

At 5 a.m., the team gathered atop Clay at Jones. Hallidie’s gripman, reportedly an old locomotive engineer, looked down the 16 percent grade into the fog and chickened out. But Hallidie, who had been hurled off scaffolding, buried in a tunnel and gone for a real-life Logger’s Revenge on roiling rapids, had confidence in his invention. He jumped into the dummy, took the grip, picked up the cable below and began to descend Clay Street. When the car reached the bottom, it was spun around on a turntable and pulled back up to the summit.

142-year-old system

Considering San Francisco’s tendency to celebrate anything with copious amounts of intoxicating beverages, the inaugural ride was a surprisingly solemn event. According to Hallidie, “There was no frivolity. The whole affair was serious, and when it was done, there was simply a mutual hand shaking and nothing but cold water drunk.” But there was one happy grace note.

As the little grip car passed Mason Street, so the story goes, a French baker in a nightcap leaned out his window and tossed a bouquet of flowers out the window. It was a homely tribute to the maiden voyage of one of the most beloved forms of urban transportation ever invented, one still humming along 142 years later.

Gary Kamiya is the author of the best-selling book “Cool Gray City of Love: 49 Views of San Francisco,” awarded the 2013 Northern California Book Award in creative nonfiction. All the material in Portals of the Past is original for The San Francisco Chronicle. E-mail: metro@sfchronicle.com

Trivia time

Last week’s trivia question: When was the last oyster grown in San Francisco Bay?

Answer: 1956.

This week’s trivia question: What incident roiled the San Francisco Symphony in 1974?

Editor’s note

Every corner in San Francisco has an astonishing story to tell. Every Saturday, Gary Kamiya’s Portals of the Past will tell one of those lost stories, using a specific location to illuminate San Francisco’s extraordinary history — from the days when giant mammoths wandered through what is now North Beach, to the Gold Rush delirium, the dot-com madness and beyond.